I have been an early fancier of Joyce Carol Oates's fiction, which struck me as that always admirable thing: writing possessed of feminine sensitivity that in no way harps on such sensitivity but simply and hardheadedly puts it to work. And surrounds it with other good, solid virtues, neither feminine nor unfeminine, such as looking at the world steadily and long, and blinking only when absolutely necessary. (p. 284)

[It] is with mixed pleasure and apprehension that I watch Miss Oates wildly sowing her gifts in all directions: essays, reviews, poetry, plays, film criticism, and probably a few other genres that slipped by me on the pages of every known and several unknown magazines. It is so much the variousness as the sheer bulk of these outpourings that worries me: I respect a polymath but not a polygrapher. And I wonder whether this material, as uneven as a fever chart in quality, is the product of a steamily teaming brain, or of a bureau full of assorted literary productions that has dogged Miss Oates since college and has finally been unleashed on the world. (pp. 284-85)

[Sunday Dinner] is an attempt at an absurdist play, without, I am afraid, the grim lucidity that lurks at the core of good theater of the absurd…. The creepy Midwestern family that returns from a visit to Mother's grave and settles down to the usual gripes, bickerings and pontifications to be consumed with the Sunday dinner, is a bunch of tolerable Oatesian grotesques, with one foot in Babbittry, the other in Grant-Woodsy gothic. But when a possibly blind census taker, who is possibly not a census taker and possibly the long-absconded Father, arrives, joins in the dinner, asks bizarre questions and obtains even queerer answers—not to mention confessions of sins as inscrutably symbolic as they are extravagantly purple, and the whole thing erupts into violence…. I tell you, I don't know what I'm telling you, or what I have been told.

Miss Oates provides some funny and well-written lines, but they prove merely that she knows about words, not necessarily about theater. (p. 285)